Blood, ignorance and moral cowardice: Gaza and the world

Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.

Once again in the Middle East, the old adage has been confirmed: seek vengeance, dig two graves.

This time around, so far, there are 150 dead Palestinians, 5 dead Israelis. With Wednesday’s ceasefire, some are cheering. A lot of diplomats are taking deep bows. Make no mistake about it, the ceasefire is good. But it is merely cause for relief, not for cheering.

Canada, like a demented cheerleader doing cartwheels for one side, happily continues to contribute absolutely nothing to stopping the fiery wheel of misery afflicting the civilian populations of Israel and Gaza. Yes, Yeats’ blood-dimmed tide is released again; is that really about defending Israel?

Question for Stephen Harper, John Baird, Jason Kenney and Peter MacKay: if you were in Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, instead of sitting in front of a fire in Ottawa with an NFL game on TV, if you were in the morgue in Gaza looking at the men, women and children now dead even though they were not members of Hamas, would you still say it was okay? Would you still write that blank cheque to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu?

Is making war on men, women, children and journalists to get at your declared enemies acceptable? Is that what Canada now stands for?

Five dead in Israel. Question for Hamas: does killing innocent Israelis advance the cause of Palestinian statehood? Does it bring the other side to the table? Does it attract people to your side whose knowledge of your grievances is equal to their command of astro-physics or Egyptian architecture? Does it make you better than the neo-conservative coalition government in Israel that stands behind principles as inhuman as yours?

Is not recognizing Israel’s right to exist civilized? Is terrorizing an entire civilian population an acceptable political tactic? Is dragging corpses around town behind motorcycles an acceptable cautionary tale or an act of grotesque barbarity?

Question for Barack Obama. What does your double-talk on this brief really mean, given your vaunted promises of peace-making from 2008? You deplore civilian carnage but endorse the rights of one of the world’s most powerful militaries against a hopelessly exposed civilian population. Do you even remember what happened four years ago — Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli assault in Gaza that left 1,200 Palestianians dead, hundreds of them innocent civilians?

In the current circumstances, here’s what we have: American requests for diplomacy out of one side of the newly re-elected president’s mouth; out of the other, full endorsement of what Netanyahu is doing with his air force — and, before this new cycle of violence has run its course, maybe his army too. (That’s right — no one knows how this ceasefire will be enforced or if it will even hold.)

Why, Barack, did they choose you and not Mitt Romney? What’s the difference? Better organization at the polls? Drones instead of tanks?

There are few clean hands here. Here in Canada, the Official Opposition and the Liberal Party are not a whole lot better than Harper and Co. on this monstrous global tragedy. These days in politics, the search is for electoral gain; justice, which is truth in action, is a mere afterthought.

The Liberals and the NDP have been equally gutless in the struggle for justice on the Middle East file (the outstanding exception is MP Libby Davies), equally egregious in their sickening hunt for political advantage — or more accurately, the avoidance of political damage.

That process apparently extends to silently endorsing the lawless notion of group punishment and a breathlessly excessive use of force, and a big middle finger to the Geneva Conventions. A nuclear power against people in tents? A terror group with Iranian rockets running a rag-tag government that wants the other side annihilated? These are the groups that are left to decide the issue?

And does support of Netanyahu’s mega-violence in response to vicious Palestinian attacks help secure Israel’s place in the Middle East? Or does it merely increase Israel’s isolation — with Islamism on the rise in the young democracy of Egypt and its relationship with Turkey in the tank — the same way that the embargo of Gaza increases the flow of arms through smuggling tunnels?

There is no question the IDF can crush Gaza. It could probably crush the armies of most countries. But how many times before it all leads to the Big Bang? Is the military reflex a policy or a death wish?

As this blood tide rises, enabled by official Canadian moral bankruptcy, cynical American politics, and now the prospect of equally disastrous Middle Eastern arms deliveries to Gaza, it is hard to remember a time when this was not so in Canada. But there was such a time. There was a time when Canadian leaders took a different view and, I would argue, a better one.

If one were looking for a quote that shows the extent to which we have lost our moral clarity in this world — on this festering issue in particular — this one would do as well as any: “Human sovereignty transcends national sovereignty.”

Think about the resonance of those words. Where did they come from? Who spoke them? They just happen to have come out of the mouth of the only Canadian ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. In fact, then-minister of External Affairs Lester B. Pearson was quoting prime minister Mackenzie King. Both men believed that the world would be a better place if individual nation-states gave up some measure of their sovereignty to an international authority in the interest of peace and security.

The idea in those days was that when regular human beings, representing “human sovereignty”, were caught in the crossfire of deadly political events, slaughtered or endangered by other governments or their own, then the international community would be there to keep the peace — if necessary by the use of force.

The abuse of the veto power at the UN Security Council by the former USSR took care of that outbreak of idealism. The failure of the UN’s policeman-of-the-world role was largely why NATO was created. Only occasionally has it been a workable substitute for the original idea.

But between the UN and NATO, the world didn’t stand by and watch Greek and Turkish Cypriots murder each other. It didn’t stand by and watch a bloodbath between Serbia and the Kosovar Albanians. It stepped into Libya to prevent a dictator’s promised bloodbath.

It is worth noting that throughout his career, Pearson clearly saw the dangers in having either national sovereignty or “the national interest” serve as the basis for Canada’s foreign policy. As Geoffrey Pearson noted, his father was one of the first people on the planet who argued that modern science and communications would eventually make interdependence on earth inevitable. And that meant that the notions of peace and justice would become indivisible.

John Baird should read Geoffrey Pearson’s book about his father, Seize the Day. It might help him to bring something more to this international crisis than humiliating ignorance trying to pass itself off as loyalty.

And so back to the nightmare unfolding in Gaza. According to Stephen Harper, Israel is totally justified in crushing Gazans over rocket attacks on sovereign Israeli territory. According to President Obama, those same rocket attacks are the “root cause” of the current crisis.

Not even the cowardly lion from the Wizard of Oz was as craven as these two leaders. As every politician knows — at least when they whisper to each other far from media microphones, far from voters, and very far from lobbyists for either side — the rockets and reprisals are not the reasons why people have died in Gaza and Israel so senselessly over the past few days.

They are dying because the plan and promise of 1948, two states living side-by-side, has been replaced by political and legal fictions of “disputed” territories, of Big Stick diplomacy and terror tactics. The participants have fallen in love with the status quo — perpetual bloodletting. The root cause of misery on both sides, the Occupation, rarely makes the news anymore. And in the case of Gaza, what is the difference between the military occupation that ended in 2005 and the brutal embargo that replaced it? The international community, to its shame, has simply gone fishing.

So the last word to Bob Dylan: How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?

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